Review: Lost 6.3: What Kate Does

Jack doesn't trust Dogen's pill.

Lost - Season Six, Episode Three - What Kate Does
Written between the 7th and 13th of January 2013

It's well-known (or at least I thought it was) that Kate-centric episodes ar enot exactly the most popular episodes of the show, mainly because the character had developed quite a sizable hatedom by this point in the show's history. Whereas Jack managed to get away from the quadrangle by working his way into the show's mythology, there were times when Kate felt like nothing more than a love interest to provide rivalry between Jack and Sawyer. Rather more wisely, this episode focussed on the character's relationship with Clare (Emilie de Ravin), whose character's return in this season is something we've been waiting for since she randomly disappeared at the end of Season Four.
     In the flash-sideways, Kate escaped from LAX by stealing a pregnant Clare's taxi, almost running over Arzt in the process. She escaped to a scrap yard where she persuaded a guy to cut her free from her handcuffs, and later she notices that Clare is still stood by the side of the road. To make up for stealing her cab at gunpoint, she takes Clare to her destination, where they discover that the foster parents for her baby have seperated and can no longer go through with the arrangment.Clare gets pains and Kate takes her to the hospital, insisting to Clare that although she's on the run from the law, she's innocent of her crimes.
    On the island in the present, Sawyer decided to leave the Temple, with Kate and Jin going after him to try and persuade him to come back. Temple leader Dogen, astounded by Sayid's Lazarus-style recovery, tortures him and pronounces him as "taken" by the "sickness." In private he asks Jack to give Sayid a pill, which Jack forces him to reveal is poison. Out in the woods, and Kate and Jin are confronted by some Others. Kate escapes, but Jin is saved by some traps set up by Clare, who has been living wild in the jungle for the past three years.

Now guess who's back with a brand new track that got
everybody on this island going maaad.

     Like the last two Kate episodes, it's been much more a vehicle to look at other characters, the writers seemingly realising that there's very little to actually do with Kate. Through her relations with them, we got looks at Jack, Sawyer and Clare in much greater detail than we thought we would have, and surprisingly little at Kate herself other than discovering that in the Flash-Sideways Universe, she is genuinely innocent of her crimes. I think the pressure of the premier also brought a few things to the fore that a standard Kate episode really isn't built to deal with, specifically the resurrectionof Sayid which poses so many questions that to not take a look at that would be something of a crime. Unfortunately, what that means for What Kate Does is that it feels more like a less exciting follow-up to the premier than just a standard episode.
     Maybe I'm being too harsh. But the second week in, Lost Season Six gave us its first rather meh episode. On its own, it's a fairly average episode that doesn't really do much to advance the plot, but when compared to the premier it followed it's a very disappointing continuation, and one that robbed the series of most of its forward momentum. It was by no means a downer, and it did nothing to particularly frustrrate me - But I think that in the end, that made it slightly more depressing. Onto next week.

Thanks.